Rayna’s Going to Live and Other News From Nashville

Now everything makes sense. After Wednesday’s (Sept. 25) season premiere of Nashville
, you can look back on the first season and understand why Rayna didn’t marry Deacon — the father of her first daughter and the love of her life — after all.

Because of the car crash at the end of the season finale, Rayna spent the majority of this week’s show in a medically-induced coma. But the flashbacks of her and Deacon as a young couple on the verge of starting an unplanned family said it all. There was the dream house they could barely afford, the marriage proposal, the passionate lovemaking, the slip back into the bottle after rehab and then, sadly, the breakup.

Ultimately, those flashbacks — happening, I think, in Rayna’s mind — showed viewers they were crazy in love but how Deacon’s struggles with alcohol made it impossible to plan any kind of real future. So she married Teddy, had two daughters and became a major superstar. And we know how that turned out.

There were other major developments since the crash, too. Scarlett got bangs and moved into Deacon’s house, Peggy (Brad Paisley‘s real-life wife, Kimberly Williams-Paisley) had a miscarriage but didn’t tell her baby daddy, Teddy. Juliette gave her cellphone number to Rayna and Deacon’s daughter Maddie, Deacon got pissed off while he sat in jail and Scarlett and Gunnar took the Bluebird Café stage to perform “Why Can’t I Say Goodnight,” a song featured on singer-songwriter Kim Richey’s 1997 album, Bittersweet.

Other mind-blowing quotes from the episode include:

Teddy: “I already have a family, Peggy. Just tell me what you want from me.”